Goodbye

This will probably be the last blog I post before departing on Saturday. I will make sure and post one or two follow-up blogs to let everyone know I got home safely and make some kind of closing
statements :).

I haven't responded until now because the evening after the last post. I got sick again with the same symptoms as last week minus the vomiting. The FSD doctor again ruled out malaria and said it was probably leftover from the bacterial infection of last week. She is currently analyzing my stool sample (which I'm sure you all love to know!) to make sure I don't have a parasite. I don't know how accurate her results will be, given that she had me deliver it in a dingy film cannister. I can't wait to be back in the American health care system again.

I learned on Wednesday evening that earlier on in the day, when our team had split up (Bryan, Frankie, Ellen, and Katie going to Buziika to watch Jjaja present and explain our 16-page comprehensive mushroom-growing guide to the Starter Set; Daisy and I went into town with our dad so he could help us bargain for gifts), the Buziika group witnessed something horrendous. A man from Buziika had stolen a motorcycle boda boda and was going to get away with it, had a large community mob not descended upon him in the road a couple doors down from Jjaja's to beat him to death. Katie said she had to keep from gagging when she saw his head smashed into the concrete and blood mingling with the dirt on the side of the road. The mob asked our team
(assuming we were medical personnel, since we are white and travel to Buziika in a St. Francis ambulance) if we could "dispose of the body." Obviously our team refused. When I told my dad about the event later that night, he didn't seem surprised. He said mob justice is inevitable when a country has a police force as corrupt as Uganda's.

Katie, Ellen, and I went running on Wednesday evening. To cool off before showering, I sat on the back porch and for some reason got in a very contemplative mood. The run had been gorgeous. The sun has begun setting earlier, so we ended up running back in fading purple light. The grassy hills, cornfields, and pineapple plantations surrounded us as we ran by skinny men on rusty bicycles hauling bundles of dark green plantains, firewood, and jerry cans of water. I remember thinking at the beginning of this trip that all of Uganda was covered in bright orange dirt. I don't know if it was the way the sun was hitting the ground, my imagination, or the true nature of the dust on our run, but I noted patches of red dirt, mixed with every shade of brown and gray under the sun. Jinja could have its own exclusively brown Crayola crayon box. As I sat on the porch, I thought about what I will miss from this trip: knowing the trick behind opening the back gate; my naked neighbor babies with rainbow beads around their bloated stomachs, their belly buttons looking like a fifth limb due to malnourishment; the hugs I get every morning from Junior, a neighborhood boy; the golden moon that twinkles through the holes in the tin roof of the shower room; the zebra butterflies that were now fluttering before my eyes, swimming in the pink and cloudy sky with the smoke from charcoal fire pits behind my house, probably preparing steamed matooke; waking up to the sound of Aljazeera on TV or traditional spiritual music on the radio; Jjaja's blue eyes and the times I'll catch her staring at me during a meeting (when she's caught, she gets a goofy grin on her face as she sticks out her bubble-gum-colored tongue at me); my mom's laugh; my dad's stories. I'm going to miss Uganda and its people dearly.

On Thursday, we brought in Ronnie, a mushroom marketing expert, to talk to Jjaja and the starter set about how they should harvest the mushrooms and prepare them for sale (dried, fresh, packaged, etc.), as well as how they should connect themselves to local markets. He was an incredible speaker, and it was so uplifting to see every participant get out pens and paper to take notes. Everyone was very inquisitive and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about doing everything possible to maximize profit. After the seminar, the Starter Set had an impromptu meeting in which they semi-restructured our suggestions for marketing strategy. This was probably one of my most favorite moments of the trip: REALLY seeing that these guys were taking ownership of the project. Even though all of the responsibilities for the trip have been turned over to Jjaja and the Starter Set now, they are all still extremely appreciative of the work we put in to buy them materials and get them started. I've received more hugs and handshakes in the past few weeks than I ever have in my life. Generosity is generally highly valued in Ugandan society, so they want to be sure we know they've recognized our effort.

On Friday, two of Aljazeera's top stories in the morning were about 1) 13 bodies being discovered in Juarez as a result of the still escalating drug-related violence and 2) riots in Honduras's capital of Tegucigalpa. I was in Juarez in March 2007, about a year before violence got bad, and I was in Tegucigalpa in February of this year. It's eerie to think how quickly stability can change. I couldn't help but wonder if something is on the verge of happening in Uganda. It was just announced that Uganda has run out of anti-retroviral medication, meaning Saint Francis and all other health clinics in the country can't provide sufficient medication for HIV/AIDS patients. My dad seems to have a very pessimistic view about the current state of affairs in his country, and probably rightfully so. We went to a lecture in Kampala on Saturday called "The Role of Foreign Aid in Developing Third World Countries," taught by a professor at Makerere University's Women and Gender Studies Department. He mentioned that Uganda is the third most corrupt country in the world (this was shocking to me, and I'd like to fact-check it when I get home), in which $250 million are lost to corruption annually. Case in point: Daisy and I were asking our dad to compare political stability and fairness amongst all the African nations. He went country by country (without a map, mind you) and made highly intelligent comments about the leadership in each country. When talking about his own country, he mentioned that although the government discovered bountiful oil reserves in the western region six years ago, that information wasn't released to the media until this year, giving the government plenty of time to siphon money off for their own luxurious expenditures. He accused the government of "perpetual deliberate robbery." He also mentioned that Uganda's Parliament would be a perfect case study in how a dictator can manipulate his law-making body to just rubber stamp anything and everything that comes across the table. I was not aware at how bad the political situation is here. Before we came over, Yoweri Museveni was painted in relatively positive light, especially since he has been internationally hailed for reducing HIV rates (which emerged in the late 1980s) from 29% to 6%. I know that those numbers are now on the rise because one of Uganda's biggest AIDS-related donors is PEPFAR (US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which specifies that funds can ONLY be used in abstinence-only prevention programs. And now with the shortage of ARVs, Ugandans are likely to suffer even more.

Sunday was a very good day. We went to our last Ugandan Mass. I smelled really good because my mom surprise-sprinkled powdered (and sparkly) perfume on me as I walked out the door. During the homily, the Congolese priest called out the muzungus in the crowd (namely, me, Daisy, Katie, and Ellen). He said he was glad to see us at Mass because "people in the Western nations don't make religion a priority like they should." As we were walking out of Mass with our parents, past vendors of jeweled rosaries and raspberry popsicles, my dad apologized for the priest's comment, saying that he thought there was just as much spiritual apathy in his country as there was in his. I spent the afternoon washing dishes and learning Luganda songs with my mom while Daisy and my dad watched the brand new Harry Potter movie (pirated, of course). I eventually was forced by my dad to abandon the dishes and go inside because he was afraid the sun would ruin my skin. Ever since my legs peeled terribly after rafting, and since I explained why white people's skin is so much more sensitive than dark-skinned people's, he's been protective of my pearly complexion. I ended the night finishing The Devil Came on Horseback, an eye-witness account of the genocide in Darfur. I forgot how fun reading for pleasure can be. Throughout the duration of this trip, I've plowed through Mountains Beyond Mountains (an account of the famous Paul Farmer, founder of the non-profit Partners in Health and influential doctor in Haiti's Central Plateau, Peru's shantytowns, and Russia's prisons), Blue Like Jazz (subtitle: "Non-religious thoughts on Christian spirituality"), Purpose-Driven Life, Things Fall Apart, and Last King of Scotland. I'm about halfway through a book written by Paul Farmer himself called Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. All have been very enlightening :).

This week will be pretty uneventful, since our project is basically completed. I'll be sure and let everyone know how the goodbye ceremonies go!!

'Til I reach the States...

Abby